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Dell & Spider-Man: Interactive Out-of-Home Game

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Dell Spiderman Scramble

To promote the release of Sony Pictures' Spider-Man: Homecoming film in the US, multinational computer technology company Dell and global outdoor advertising company Kinetic have created a multiplayer game on digital billboards in New York's Times Square.

Pedestrians passing by the two stacked digital billboards running the campaign can visit a website on their mobile phones to join the game. Four players at a time get to use controls on their phone to race their scrambling Spider-Man characters up the digital billboards. Complete with high-score leaderboards, the campaign turns part of the city into a video game arcade. The experience is powered by Dell hardware, and it comes with interstitial ads promoting Dell's Inspiron 15 gaming laptop.

In Third Spaces: Targeting the Transitory, part of our Invisible Marketing Industry Trend, we explored the use of personal devices and digital billboards to anticipate and respond to consumer needs in the moment, giving them information and services to remove friction from their day. By contrast, Dell's campaign is more of an intervention during the everyday, providing a playful incentive for consumers to linger with branded content.

Creating communal experiences by linking individual devices is a key direction: As personal digital experiences become more sophisticated, brands and marketers have an interest in keeping them open for interaction. For more on teasing out the communal opportunities of personal devices, see Retail's VR Future: Communal Digital and our Pop Culture Round-Up: May 2017.